I was on the metro in DC a few days ago. It was around 5pm and the sun was setting. I looked out the window. It was beautiful. I looked around. There was nothing particularly different about this metro ride. People around me were on their phones, occupied with whatever was on their screen. I also went to reach for my phone but stopped. I straightened my back and took a deep breath. I looked at the people around me in the metro. These people were missing the sunset! I don’t think not liking social media is a fringe opinion anymore. So many people are depressed, particularly those of us that grew up with social media. There are enough studies that prove this. There has been a sharp rise in depression. The people in these demographics are constantly operating at an ambient level of anxiety. I have an eighteen-year old sister who shows this to be true. Social media negatively affects their mental health and decreases their ability to do or even know to do the things they want to do. Instagram has over one billion users. Over 60% of those users are females under the age of 34. If the perfect female bodies portrayed on Vogue magazines were bad for female self-esteem, then surely having the most attractive people portray the best versions of themselves all in one app would have a similar if not worse effect on the same demographic. What happens if a teenage girl posts a photo of herself? You don't have to be a genius to see who gets more likes. Talk about killing self-esteem. Social media is ruining our attention span. Companies like Facebook and Twitter base their business models off of figuring out how to exploit end-user attention. More attention leads to more time spent on app, which ultimately leads to advertisement companies able to promote more frequently. How do these companies do this? They hire engineers and social scientists to figure out how to manipulate human emotions. That slot-machine like effect that happens every time you refresh your Twitter newsfeed? That's intentional. The recommendation algorithms that lead teenage girls looking up dieting videos to anecdotes on anorexia? An unfortunate side effect. Edward Wilson, a famous biologist, is famous for saying something that I believe appropriately describes our relationship with the online landscape: "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology." These Silicon Valley tech giants are skirting the rules of our medieval institutions and taking advantage of our basic human attention spans that need to be validated. I recently listened to a podcast about our relationships with these companies and the balance of power. What stuck out to me was the side-stepping these companies were doing by not taking responsibility for their actions, yet reaping the monetary benefits. Constitutional law describes relationships between individuals and the federal government. Legislative law or contractual law defines relationships between individuals and each other in society. Fiduciary law is between lawyers and clients and doctors and patients. It's the way the law in the U.S. makes sense of relationships where one party has asymmetric power over another. A lawyer isn't allowed to turn on their client and say "I'm going to use this sensitive information you gave me and sell it to the other side because I'll make more money that way". Fiduciary law protects clients from situations like that from happening. The key aspect that determines the asymmetry of power is the amount of information the service collects on their client and how that could be used to compromise the integrity of that client. The degree of that compromising information is the degree to which the relationship should not be equal contract. The biggest lie that these Silicon Valley tech companies preach is that they are in an equal parties relationship with the user. You joined the app. You are liable for negative side effects. You clicked the link. You scrolled to that video. What is unsaid is the entire workforce of engineers behind the screen, creating a virtual you and continuously learning what will keep "you" scrolling. Factor in AI research, and these companies know you better than you know yourself, which is an unprecedented level of power imbalance. These companies are going to defend themselves and say that humans are free agents and if users don't like the service the company provides, they are free to stop. They are going to push the agenda that what exists is an equal contract relationship. Mark Zuckerberg didn't start with a diabolical plan to turn people into sheep. No, this nerd slow-walked into his power. But with great power comes great responsibility. The government must push to have these companies switch to a fiduciary model. This is a challenge, in part because the ill-gotten profits that these companies earn by "breaching their duties" is not just money, it's attention span. Our brightest minds have gotten us into this mess. Now they need to get us out.